Prodigious
by The Disreputable Writer
Summary: Four women, and how they made Ash who he is.  Warning: child abuse, mentions of suicide, character death


**Mrs. Curry**

"Ash, you're a prodigy!" she said.

I didn't even have to think about my answer. "No, I'm not."

I guess I panicked. I didn't want to be a prodigy. I just wanted to keep my head down and survive until I turned eighteen. After that, I could fuck off and do what I wanted. But prodigies got noticed. People expected things from them. I couldn't have that.

Not much I could do about it though, now that Mrs. Curry had caught me.

I liked Mrs. Curry. She never said shit about the fact that I wore my father's old clothes, and she didn't give me that condescending look that most teachers did when I turned in homework on paper stained with beer and cigarette ash from the kitchen table at home. She taught us and she treated us fair; I could respect that, even as the fourteen-year-old punk that I was.

But at that moment, with her eyes shining as she looked at my work on the computer screen, she might as well have been Satan himself. She was going to ruin everything.

It was my own fault, of course, for sneaking into the computer lab after school. They wouldn't let my ass in there during the day. Back then, computers were for the advanced placement kids, not trailer trash like me. But by learning to pick locks (and by not being a dumbass about it) I managed to use those sweet machines for a few hours a couple times a week. I had to cover my tracks, which meant erasing my work at the end of every night and resisting the urge to crack the towers open and make my own modifications, but it was worth it. Until I got caught.

Mrs. Curry looked up from the screen. Looked at me like I suddenly had an aura about me or something. No one had ever looked at me like that before. I decided right then that I didn't like it. "Don't be modest," she said, "You have a gift."

And then, all of a sudden, I got angry. One second I wanted to scurry out of there like a rat, and then she said that and I just wanted to scratch her eyes out. Modest? She thought I was modest?

The truth was, calling me a prodigy was a fucking insult. It was an insult to all the times I snuck library books home under my coat and read them by the glow of the bug zapper outside my window. It was an insult to all the hours I had spent – every second of my free time for as long as I could remember – grabbing every stray piece of knowledge that fell into my hick hands and clinging to it, poring over it, turning it into something useful. It was an insult to the computer that I was building and hiding under the floorboards of my closet – every piece of which was either bought (with money I couldn't spare) or stolen (which would have earned me a whipping if my father ever found out).

To hear my skill called a "gift" as if someone had handed it to me, as if I hadn't worked and sweated and bled for it… Well, suddenly I didn't care about keeping my head down anymore.

"_Fuck you!_" I shouted, and I spat on the tile floor between Mrs. Curry's shoes. And then I ran.

But I couldn't run forever. I had to come back to school the next day, where Mrs. Curry was waiting for me with an application to join the advanced computer class. I tore it up and threw it in her face. I knew twice as much about computers as any of those fuckers anyway.

She pushed me and pushed me, and I fought her every step of the way. She made the school test me in every subject, and when I failed she made them test me again. After a month of nonstop tests and shouting matches, I gave up and stopped choosing the wrong answers on purpose. The next semester, the school bumped me up two grade levels.

She was the one who put the idea of MIT into my head, and convinced me that I wanted it bad enough to stand up to my father for it. When my father broke my jaw, she was the one who called CPS. When I ran away from my third foster home, she was the one who helped me get emancipated.

When I finally did get into MIT at the age of sixteen, she was so excited that you would have thought I was her own son.

The week after I arrived in Cambridge, I got a letter saying that Mrs. Curry was dead of cancer. She'd known she was sick, and she never told me.

Old bitch didn't even give me a chance to thank her.

* * *

><p><strong>Shane Lore<strong>

MIT wasn't exactly what I had expected.

It was nice in a lot of ways, of course. The classes and the equipment were choice. I got to work with the kind of hardware that they wouldn't have let me touch in high school. Learned a ton. Aced all my classes. But there was always this feeling of unease. Maybe it was the fact that my classmates never really warmed up to me. Maybe it was because I could feel the judgment radiating off the professors when they saw me rocking the mullet and plaid flannel. Or maybe I was just so used to my life being shitty that I couldn't adjust to having it good for a change.

Whatever it was, I was already pretty disillusioned with the whole thing by the time my frosh roommate Chester, the one guy on campus who I actually got along with, up and got himself killed.

The school called it a suicide, and no one questioned it because Chester was, well, kind of an odd one. But I knew him, and underneath it all he was a really happy guy, so I had my suspicions about what had really happened to him even before _she_ showed up.

She came in through my window in the middle of the night. I might have been scared if she had been more than five feet tall, but she wasn't, so I was more confused than anything. She snuck in as quiet as a cat. Her skin was as black as the sky outside, and her hair hung in dreadlocks down to her shoulder blades. Her little body stiffened when she noticed me watching her, but she didn't seem scared of me either.

"Oh," she said, "You're awake."

"Yeah," I said, sitting up in my bed. I wasn't sure what else to say to her, so I blurted out, "Nice hair."

She must have thought that I was being sarcastic, because she sneered at me and said, "Right back atcha, NASCAR."

That was when I started wondering how my life had suddenly become so weird. If I had only known how weird it could get… "Who are you?" I said, because it seemed like the thing to ask.

"None of your business." She was going through Chester's things. She didn't take anything, just shuffled through his notes and looked under his bed and such, like she expected to find him hiding somewhere.

"You broke into my room," I pointed out, "Your name is kind of the least you could give me."

She hesitated, then said, "Shane Lore. Where's Chet?"

"Shane's a boy's name," I said. Then, because her eyes warned me that I was cruising for a bruising, I answered her question. "You mean Chester? He died two days ago. Jumped off the roof of the Whitaker Building."

She let loose a stream of profanity that lasted almost a minute. I filed away a few of her more inventive curses to use later. "He was my man on the inside," she muttered, pacing nervously, "I called in a favor to get him to look into this case. Damn! His mom's gonna put my head on a spike!"

"Ain't like you killed him," I said, still not quite sure what had happened to my life between going to bed and getting into this conversation.

Shane shook her head, actual tears in her eyes. The tears might have made an impression on me, except at the same time I noticed that she had a pistol and three knives in holsters on her belt. That was a little distracting. "I might as well have," she said, "Sending him after that kitsune."

And then she explained to me what a kitsune was.

And then I tried to throw her out of my room. It didn't work very well for me. If anyone asked later, I would tell them she pulled her gun on me, but the truth is that she was just fast like a freak.

"Oh, no you don't," she said after she had thrown me on the floor, "Chet's dead, so now you get to help me find this bitch."

"How do you know it's even a woman?" I asked, rubbing my shoulder where she had twisted it.

"They're almost always women," she said, "Pretty. She'd definitely hate dogs. And she'd need access to human brains."

And then, it was suddenly so clear to me. She was giving me search criteria. All I needed was an engine to plug them into. "I'll bet I can write you a program," I said. Minutes later, I gave her a name that matched everything she had been able to come up with about kitsunes – a professor in the Brain and Cognitive Science department. At the time, I felt bad. After all, I was clearly sending a crazy lady after a totally innocent neuroscientist, but by that point I didn't care as long as it got Shane out of my room.

Well, it got her out of my room, but unfortunately she dragged me along with her. And let me tell you, seeing a respected college professor with a fridge full of pituitary glands in Tupperware will really overhaul your view of the world.

After she had killed the thing, Shane took me home. She seemed pleased. I couldn't stop shaking. "You know," she said cheerfully, like we had just gone on a nice stroll, "It took Chet near a month to get close enough to that kitsune that she bothered to kill him. You figured out who she was in half an hour, in your pajamas. And you're just a baby! You must be some kind of prodigy."

I didn't bother to explain to her why I hated that word. I just wanted to go to sleep and find out that the whole night had been a bad dream. "I'm nineteen," I grumbled.

"Like I said. A baby," she laughed. At my door, she scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. "Here's my number. If this MIT thing doesn't work out for you, there're a lot of us out there who could really use your help."

I never wanted to see her again. Or so I told myself. But she had shown me the awful truth, the one that every Hunter wishes they could forget. It ate at me.

And two months later, when MIT kicked me out after one too many bar brawls, I dug her number out of my wallet and called it.

* * *

><p><strong>Ellen Harvelle<strong>

Shane was right. In the right circles, I was a hot commodity.

I kept my head down, same as always. Even amongst Hunters, my name wasn't very well known. I didn't have any kills under my belt. I didn't have any harrowing stories. But certain Hunters knew that if they had a certain kind of case, and a certain amount of money (or beer; I wasn't picky), then a certain mulleted piece of trailer trash could find them what they needed. In a community of people who rode around in vans and motorhomes, who used their grandfathers' guns and thought that cell phones were the height of technology, I was the God of Computers.

I rode with Shane for almost a year, but we eventually went our separate ways. She was a Hunter; I was an analyst. I did more good on my own, meeting other Hunters and spreading my notoriety. And she did better work when she didn't have to look after my ass as well as her own.

I was hitching a ride with a couple of Hunters named Tamara and Isaac through the middle of Nebraska when I got a ping on one of my alerts. Years ago, I had compiled a list of all the Hunters I knew and put them into a program that monitored obituaries all over the country. When someone died, I was always the first to know. I had gotten to where I dreaded the sound of that alert, but it wasn't like I could ignore it.

I dug out my laptop and checked to see which Hunter had bitten the dust. But it wasn't a Hunter. It was my old man. I had forgotten that I had put his name in there.

"What is it?" asked Tamara, turning to look at me.

"Nothing," I said, closing the laptop. And you know what? It really was nothing to me. You'd think that even after everything - the drinking and the screaming and the abuse – that I'd still feel something for the man who brought me into the world, but I didn't. I literally couldn't have given fewer shits about it. In fact, it was almost a relief. Like the last thing that tied me to my old life as a scared, nerdy kid was finally gone.

Then, two hours down the road, the alert pinged again. And this time it was Shane.

"Whoa," said Tamara, "You don't look so good."

"I need a drink," was all I could get out.

Isaac and Tamara shared a glance. Then Isaac shrugged and said, "Harvelle's Roadhouse isn't too far from here, but we're in a hurry. We'll have to drop you off."

That was just fine by me. An hour later, I was standing with all my bags at Ellen Harvelle's door. Not that I knew who Ellen Harvelle was yet. As far as I knew, she was just the stern-looking woman behind the bar who glared at me harder and harder throughout the night as I remembered my friend the best way I knew how: by getting cross-eyed, falling-down, where-the-hell-did-my-shoes-go drunk.

The Hunters in the bar thought I was a riot. Ellen, not so much. She finally came around and started yelling at me. Something about closing time and how I couldn't sleep under her barstools.

Most of the rest of the conversation is pretty much a blur, but I do remember shouting in her face, "Bitch, if you want me to shut up then you can fucking _make me._" Then next thing I remember is waking up sprawled on one of her pool tables with a bruise on my face in the shape of her fist. Lady had a mean right hook.

Funny enough, we got along great after that.

The Roadhouse was the perfect base of operations. Hunters came and went, so I had plenty of business, and I was happy that I wasn't living out of other people's vehicles anymore. Ellen gave me my own room and told me that if I ever laid eyes on her daughter with lust in my heart that she would have my balls in a jar. I don't think she was kidding, either. I made sure to think of Jo as a sister from then on.

Once I had been there for about a month she started calling me her "resident prodigy," so I gave her the speech about why I considered that an insult. I had practiced that speech a lot, and I'd gotten pretty good at it. It usually shut people up. But not Ellen.

"Well, that's a load of horse shit," she said without so much as thinking about it, "Okay, some people who use that word don't understand what you've sacrificed - fair enough. But you're not going to win any awards for the worst childhood around here, so don't even try. You're special. Deal with it. You trying to convince people that you don't have a gift is an insult to all the kids who worked just as hard as you and who will never be half as smart."

I took a while to think on that. Then I went back to Ellen and told her that she could call me a prodigy if she wanted.

Now, at this point you might be noticing a pattern. After Mrs. Curry and Shane, you might be thinking that this is the part where Ellen dies.

Well, she does. Later.

But I do first.

* * *

><p><strong>Rachel<strong>

For a second, I thought that it had been a dream. That the demons and the fire and everyone dead or dying around me had been a creepy-vivid hallucination. After all, I was back in the Roadhouse. No demons. No fire. No dead people.

No people at all, actually, except for a hot blonde who was sitting at the bar, staring at me. It was unnerving. I'd met some Hunters who could look through you, but I'd never felt like someone was looking _into_ me before. She didn't stare the way a human stares.

"Oh," I said, "I'm not gonna like this, am I?"

She smiled. She didn't smile the way a human smiles either. "If it's any consolation, of the two places you might have gone, you ended up in the right one."

"So this is Heaven," I said, looking around and trying to sound nonchalant. I felt like I should have been freaking out, but I was oddly calm. It's hard to get too worked up about anything in Heaven. I still don't know whether that's a perk of the place or if it's totally brainwashing-level creepy. "Looks an awful lot like Earth."

"You generate your own Heaven," she explained, "This is a place your mind has created, where you can be happy forever."

"Not much fun around here without my friends," I pointed out.

"You can summon anyone you like to this place," she said.

"Not Ellen and Jo," I challenged her, "Not Sam and Dean. They're still alive." I was testing the rules of the place just as much as I was trying to confirm that my friends hadn't all gotten themselves killed too.

The woman just smiled. "Anyone," she assured me, "You can replay any memory. Devise any scenario. This is paradise."

"I don't want to replay memories or play make-believe with my mind-puppets," I said, "I want to talk to my actual friends. What about Shane Lore and Christine Curry? You've got them up here, right? Let me see them."

Her smile slipped. "They have their memories of you," she said, "And you have your memories of them. But people's separate Heavens do not overlap."

That was when I decided that this Heaven thing was bullshit. "So this is a cage," I said, starting to get angry. It's hard to get angry in Heaven, but I tried my best.

"This is paradise," she repeated, but she wasn't smiling anymore.

"So who are you? My jailer?"

"I am an angel," she said, looking pleased about the fact, "Rachel is my name. I'm here to help you get settled in."

"You look like a librarian," I said.

She gestured at her body. "This is an approximation of one of my possible Earthly vessels," she said, whatever that meant, "In my true form, I have four wings and skin the color of brass, and my brilliance would wound your soul if you looked upon me."

I muttered, "Good thing you're so modest." If she heard, she didn't react.

"You're a good man, Ash," she said, "This is your reward. Lay down your troubles. Rest. Enjoy this place that my Father has made for you." But she just sounded like she was reading off a cue card. Welcome to Heaven! Have a cocktail! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

"I'm not tired. And your father can kiss my ass." I thought better of saying it, but I said it anyway.

Suddenly Rachel wasn't on the barstool. She was in my face, standing in front of me, there in a flash and a rustle of feathers. She was scolding me (something about blasphemy being frowned upon in Heaven), but I wasn't listening. At the instant she had zapped herself from the stool to my side, I had seen it. A moment of static. A crack in the façade. As if Heaven were a video game and she had activated the line of code that let her override the "no teleporting" rule.

I saw it all then. Heaven wasn't the end of the line; it was just a new kind of computer. New rules to break. New languages to learn. New systems to hack. Suddenly I felt the way I had the first time I laid my fingers on a keyboard. In front of me was this terrifying, beautiful, powerful, impossible construct, and in my heart I knew that I was smart enough to make it do whatever I wanted it to.

I must have looked like I was up to no good, because Rachel said, "Whatever you're planning, you should know that no human soul has ever thwarted the Heavenly Host."

I told her, "Well, clearly the Heavenly Host has never met someone like me."

"What makes you so special?" she asked. I got the impression that the question wasn't rhetorical. That she really was curious.

I gave her my winningest smile. "Don't you know?" I said, "I'm a prodigy."


End file.
